The doorbell rang a few minutes later, before I had the chance to put on mascara. I rationalized that it couldn’t be him, Aslan lived way downtown. It must be a messenger from Sean, new pages he wanted me to look at. I buzzed the door and there he was, no-color hair over no-color eyes in less defined a fashion than ever before.

He shrugged off his coat and flopped onto the bed like a man who had just come back from the steelworks. In fact, he had spent the day laying down tracks in the studio. He boasted that he had written two of them all by himself. I asked him what the first song was called. Aslan blinked his eyes. He clearly had not thought about this yet. “‘Pendulum.’” And the second song? “‘Pensioner,’” he replied proudly, the corners of his mouth curling up.

His mouth was always curling, whether it was up or down, like a novelty fish you put in your palm, a sliver of red fortune. Except they don’t tell your future. They tell your mood, for people who aren’t sure what they’re feeling. The red fish says “Passionate,” “Sad,” “Angry,” with the tiniest flick of its tail or curl on its side. Either this means that it takes very little effort to be passionate, sad, or angry. Or that it’s easy to slip into the place where you wouldn’t know what you were feeling if it weren’t for a novelty fish. That’s why you get them in crackers. It’s like a safety kit: no one ever knows what they’re feeling at the holidays. All they really feel is the turkey inside them, pressing hard against their gullet like a lie.

Aslan’s mouth curled up and stayed there. He was in such a good mood, so pleased with himself, so pleased with me. I tried to think of something to say to this boy who, for all he had revealed, might as well be mentally subnormal, and I couldn’t think of anything. I could feel everything, but I couldn’t speak it. The everything lodged itself in my throat like a student sit-in, stubborn and pointless. While he went to the bathroom, I flipped through my diary to remind myself I knew how to use words. I fell upon a page in bold lettering, and when he came back, I said it out loud: “You are my connect-the-dots boy.”

I knew what I meant. That I had from him but the slimmest of clues with which to form a man. That he was my creation. That he was incomplete without me to fill him in. That having taken the time and effort to invent him, connect-the-dots boy had me so hard, it didn’t matter that he was constructed from paper and pencil rather than flesh and blood.